A/N: Calling this a Loveless AU may be overstating it a bit - I took some aspects of the Fighter/Sacrifice pair concept from Loveless and put them on the Slayer/Watcher concept from Buffy, but there's no magic word battles with bondage damage or anything. Feel free to imagine various Buffy characters with cat ears, though!
This is really more of a proof of concept than a full story, but I still liked it enough to post, so... here it is.
The demon rakes its claws across the side of Buffy's face, and she flinches automatically even though she knows there will be no pain. She delivers a swift kick to the creature's head, dances back out of its flailing reach, and turns anxiously to look over her shoulder.
Giles already has a hand pressed to his cheek, covering the new wound. Blood seeps out between his fingers, and his face is twisted in an agonized grimace. "Don't take your eyes off it!" he orders urgently, through gritted teeth. "You need to stay focused, Buffy!"
She hesitates for a moment longer, watching the blood trickle down his chin as she listens to the demon struggling to its feet behind her. The desire to obey is not quite as strong as it had been with Merrick, who shared her true name. It is not the overwhelming compulsion she had resented and resisted until it had inevitably gotten her Watcher killed, but it is still there, irritating and insistent.
She does not want to see Giles killed. She tears her eyes from the dripping blood and turns the full force of her anger on the demon.
The battle is over quickly, a sickening crack of bones and the beast going limp beneath her hands, and Buffy turns on her heel before its body hits the ground and marches over to Giles. She grabs his wrist, yanks his hand away from his face, and tries to inspect the damage she has done. The blood is smeared all across his skin, and it is difficult to see the jagged claw marks underneath and determine how deep they are by moonlight alone. She grips his arm tighter and tries to drag him out of the graveyard, pull him toward the streetlights at its edge where she can see better.
Giles digs in his heels and attempts to shake her off. "It's fine. I'm fine," he mutters, and Buffy stops to scowl at him but does not let go. "Leave it, Buffy. Please."
It's the please that make her relent, the meaninglessly kind gesture of turning a command into a request, and she releases his wrist. By now she can at least tell that the cuts are not bleeding anymore, however deep they might have been. That happens with some demons, kill the monster and the damage starts to heal right away. She knows that doesn't make it any less painful in the moment.
There was a time, a brief period of only a few months between Merrick dying and Giles tracking her down and convincing her to try and forge a new bond with him, when Buffy did this alone. A Slayer without a Watcher, travelling the country and hunting down the evils of the world all by herself. It had been almost impossibly hard, her powers lessened and her instincts dulled without the other half she was meant to have for this fight. But at least when she made a mistake back then, it was her own body getting torn up.
Giles pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, leaving a bloody fingerprint on the corner of the lens. "That was quite well done," he says, nodding in the direction of the demon's corpse. "We should do another search of the graveyard to make sure it was alone, and then we can get you home. You must be tired."
Buffy nods dully in agreement. She has never been so tired in her life.